There are two ways that bones are experienced. On the one hand, they feel like solid things inside us connected by joints. On the other hand, when we experience them more deeply, we feel them to live at the very core of our being – as when we say, that chilled me to the bone or I just know that in my bones.
The experience and assumption that bones are solid comes from how they look compared to other tissues in the body and certainly from when you bump your shin on an open filing cabinet drawer! It is also significant that the only bones we usually see are dead ones in the food we may eat – thus, the common largely erroneous association of the skeleton with death.
The perception of the skeletal system as the living core of one’s being, comes from a deeper experience of life. It may be a poem you read, a powerful music, through dancing or an encounter with a deep inner truth. This sensation may be triggered by the direct experience of movement and bodymind therapies that explicitly engage the skeletal system – such as yoga and Zero Balancing®.
The feelings most commonly described here of the deeper experience at one’s skeletal core are:
1) it doesn’t seem solid
2) it feels alive
3) it feels like light is flowing through it
4) it is associated with a feelings of stability, safety and bliss.
In eastern thought, the skeletal level of the person is associated with “ancestral chi”. This refers to the fact that you personally are not the source of your life. You didn’t invent this life, it is an incredible gift bestowed by one’s parents and theirs in turn – we each are just arrayed on this magnificent “tree of life” that is viewed widely as the whole of living nature – and more specifically, as the branching structures of your anatomy and physiology.
Accompanying the illuminated experience of the bones, then naturally is a deep gratitude felt at our very core, for the miraculous gift of life. This illuminated experience has been captured wonderfully by artists through the ages and just yesterday a friend sent me the link to a glass and light sculptor. May the visions evoked help you experience your core in its “true” light.
For more info on Eric Franklin, the artist who made these incredible sculptures, go to http://ericfranklin.com/